Because

Because

Because is an interesting word. According to the Shorter OED, it was originally two words by and cause, after the old French par cause de (by reason of). To say “p because q” is to say “p by cause q”, where “cause” means “reason”. The Concise OED gives “for the reason that; since”. Roget’s Thesaurus gives us “on account of”, “in view of”, “on the grounds that”, “thanks to”, among others. Thus, “because” can be used to state the relation between premises and conclusion in a logical argument: if p entails q, q is true because of p—and hence “by cause” of p.  In other words, the because relation is a causal relation: premises are causal because they are one term of a because relation. The because relation coincides with (is identical to) a causal relation, as these words were originally meant—and as they still mean now. All uses of “because” are causal uses, i.e., specify reasons for something. There is no non-causal “because”: the logical use of “because” is a causal use—just look at the word. To be because of something is to be by cause of that thing. Semantically, then, reasons are causes. This is intuitively correct, since causes are productive, consequential, generative—as premises in an argument are. They bring things forth, make them the case, engender them. Some premises, especially in inductive arguments, are what we call evidence, and evidence produces generalizations and theories. All this talk should be taken literally and not dismissed on account of philosophical prejudices—as that all causes are physical events (or some kind of event). This is to say that logic is a causal science—a science of productive reasons. Grammar is similar: it too is a type of cause—productive, generative, fecund. Sentences have the grammatical form they do in virtue of the rules of grammar—“by cause of” these rules. Logic and grammar are indeed causally efficacious par excellence, given their power to produce infinitely many consequences. One might be forgiven for suggesting that logico-grammatical causation is the conceptually fundamental kind of causation. It certainly involves reasons, and that concept seems to belong originally to the rational realm—what is sometimes called the “space of reasons”. The concept of reasons has been extended to the non-mental non-rational world, and hence brought the concept of cause along with it. Maybe our ancestors took a while until they were ready to extend these notions outside the rational mind and apply them to brute unthinking nature—a form of anthropomorphic projection. In any case, these notions have a perfectly proper home in the characterization of logical and grammatical relations. One can imagine someone insisting that only these relations are correctly described as causal, the rest of nature being governed by mere constant conjunction or some such. No merely physical phenomenon can be the reasonthat something happens! Rocks don’t have reasons.

These reflections should prompt us to reconsider causal theories as they have been proposed in recent analytical philosophy. What is meant by “causal” in these theories? This question is typically avoided (or dodged) in presentations of the theories in question. We are supposed to know what is intended. Thus, we have the causal theory of perception, of memory, of knowledge, of reference, of action, of emotion. The general idea is that these concepts have causal definitions: the essence of the concept is captured by a causal condition. For example, the essence of perception consists in causation of an internal sense experience by an external object. The point I want to make is that such theories can be readily reformulated using the “because” locution and allied locutions. Instead of saying “A caused B” we can say “B because of A”: for example, the sense experience occurred because of the external object (not, say, because of a hallucinogenic drug). This comes to the same thing, does it not? And then we could paraphrase that as “The reason the experience occurred was the existence of the external object (not some drug)”. The heart of the theory (right or wrong) is preserved under these reformulations. The same goes for the other causal theories: causes become reasons—the reason for the belief in the case of knowledge is the fact believed, not an irrational whim. This enables us to see our way clear to including the causal theory of entailment (logical implication) with the other causal theories. All are causal in the broad sense I have been adumbrating. And note that I don’t mean a causal theory of inference, i.e., mental acts of a certain sort; I mean logical implication itself. It is quite obvious that chains of inference occurring in a human mind are causally connected, but it is quite another thing to claim that logical implication is causal, since it is not psychological and episodic. Still, it sustains the use of “because”, because premises are reasons for conclusions: it is because Socrates is a man and all men are mortal that Socrates is mortal. It is owing to those facts, by dint of them, in virtue of their existence. When a conclusion follows from a set of premises, it is a consequence of them, an “effect” of them—a resultant, an end-product, an outcome. It is thanks to the premises that the conclusion holds. It is true that there may be subvarieties of causation applicable in the different cases, but they are all united under the broad concept of cause, as this is ordinarily understood. The causation relevant to perception is not the same as that applicable to knowledge, but the concept of causation is flexible enough to include both; fundamentally, it is just the notion of dependence, derivation, determination. Causation is about lines of descent: what hinges on what, what gives rise to what. It isn’t necessarily about energy transfer or mechanistic contact or action-at-a-distance or a primitive inexplicable oomph. It’s about how things hang together in relations of subordination. It’s about what precedes and controls, what is prior and productive.[1]

[1] The reason people haven’t appreciated this is that they have been fixated on certain putative paradigms—never the best way to get the full measure of a concept (or type of fact). This comes from a desire to make the abstract and general into the concrete and particular. Many metaphysical concepts suffer from this problem, or we suffer from it in our grasp of such concepts.